News from the Plains: All this RED can make you BLUE
These goodbyes don't get easier
by Barry Friedman
(No politics today)
My daughter, Nina, here for Thanksgiving, flew back to Oregon yesterday with her boyfriend and yoga mat. I'm getting used to these goodbyes. They get easier.
(Who am I kidding?)
Years ago, same airport ...
The father had rehearsed this moment for years: the goodbye hug, the words of encouragement, the kiss on the cheek. Of course, back then, when the little girl wore a ballcap and carried a sword, he hadn't imagined her with a pierced nose and lip and heading to France to finish college or growing food in her own garden. He used to like making her hamburgers on Tuesdays--always on Tuesdays, for Tuesday was "Burger Night" after the divorce--before the little girl became a vegetarian and talked of becoming a biological anthropologist.
It was her head on his shoulder at this moment.
They sat upstairs, near the Hertz Counter and the information booth and the clocks that gave the time in three different cities. Her mother, his ex, sitting on the opposite side of her, went to get coffee from Starbucks. He watched her walk away, thought of their son, now dead, and what he would be doing at this moment.
He stroked his daughter's hair.
"I'm not ready to go," she said.
"Yeah, you are."
That, too, he had rehearsed.
"Will you miss me?" he said.
"Yes," she said, sounding like a little girl.
"Shoots from way downtown ..."
"Bang!" she said, perfectly.
It was a routine from SportsCenter they had always done. He told her she was the only eight-year-old girl who knew how it went.
Touches absolutely ... NOTHING but the bottom of the net
His daughter could do Dan Patrick better than anyone's daughter.
"You know," the father said, "who else should be going besides you? Who else deserves this moment?"
Two unusual rhetorical questions, he thought, as soon as he asked them--she wasn't worried about either.
The mother came back with two cups and what looked like a scone.
She broke it in two pieces. He watched them both eat.
"So, okay, Amsterdam, then Bordeaux, yes?" he asked, though he had made the reservations.
"Yes."
The mother kept repeating, "Oh, honey, oh, honey, you'll be great."
Sitting between them, the daughter, so cynical (she got that from her father), let them blabber on.
I'll be great? What does that even mean?
It was time to go.
The father carried her backpack to the checkpoint. He felt her hair dryer poking through the canvass. First a hug for the mother, then him, a kiss on the cheek ... then the mother again.
The mother cried first.
The father, having promised himself--having promised himself-- not to cry, didn't.
He did.
"No crying, you baby!" she said, which made him laugh.
The first guard checked her boarding pass, passport; the second handed her a Kleenex, for now she was.
The daughter looked back, smiled, waved to her divorced parents who, standing together, were as mismatched as ever.
Jesus, she thought, what were they thinking?
The father moved so he could see her progress through the line; the mother stayed put.
"Where is she?"
"Over there," the father said, pointing.
"I can't see ... oh, yes, I can."
And then she waved again, two hands over the head, a final kiss blown through TSA workers, x-ray machines, a stack of bins, other passengers not crying. She kept waving, blowing kisses, winding up, big flourish, throwing them to him, like she was on a float in a parade.
And then she walked the final few steps through security, through childhood, and was gone.